At the Digital Britain summit yesterday, BT's Ian Livingstone made the comment that Britain needed digital roads for Fords, not Ferraris.
Notes El Reg:
"Of course a Ferrari is faster than a Ford," Livingstone said. "But most people are happy with a Ford."
BT has so far committed £1.5bn to roll fibre out as far as streetside cabinets, connecting about 40 per cent of premises by 2012. The upgrade will offer speeds of up to 40Mbit/s per second downstream, short of the more than 100Mbit/s fibre optic lines into homes and businesses could deliver. Livingstone said there weren't enough applications that needed such speeds. "Ultimately it's about what people will pay for," he said. "The economic case is not great."
He is both right, and wrong. He is right on both counts in the short term:
(i) There are not (yet) applications that need such speeds.
(ii) The Economic case is not great.
However, he is also wrong looking into the medium term - the history of the internet is that bandwidth and applications are linked in a DNA-like helix. To a large extent, "Web 2.0" is an expression of what can be done once early broadband existed. Video applications like iPlayer and YouTube are now pushing that bandwidth generation to its limit. Cometh the next ramp up of bandwidth, cometh the next raft of applications.
And thus cometh the economic business case..... but to get those pipes, now, will require some government arm twisting.
But also underlying this worry is something that does massively threaten the economics of the rollout, which is the Universal Service Obligation (USO) - the requirement that every citizen needs to be plumbed into Digital Britain. El Reg again:
Virgin Media chief executive Neil Berkett said that his firm's investment plans, along with those of BT, meant policy should focus on how to bring next generation access to rural areas where the return on investment would be poor.
"Digital Britain is about Digital Britain, not digital cities," he said.
This is another way of saying what no-one wants to say outright - that getting c 66% national coverage costs in commercially, getting 80% probably doesn't but is affordable, and getting 100% will be ridiculously expensive - and thus the bill must be footed by the government (who, unfortunately have handed all the lolly to the banks without gaining control, and the banks are now not - predictably enough - giving it back in investment).
The Digital Britain report assumes that a 2Mb downlink pipe is acceptable for USO, and all the (independent) analysis says it probably is for the bulk of services - but as you can imagine, a plethora of special interest groups have popped up demanding a Digital Superhighway past every home no matter how far, poor or useful it is. And given that they are busy seizing the moral high ground with a vice-like grip, its a brave politician who will gainsay them. Thus the worry by the infrastructure players is that they will be left with the bill after the government passes a Digital Britain Bill later this year.
So, allow us to say the unsayable - give us your poor, you dispossessed etc etc and we will tell them that unfortunately, in the beginning they are going to get the Digital Country Lanes. There has been no major infrastructure buildout in history, from canals to roads to sewers to telephones to the internet, where this has not been the case. If the Digital Britain report had come out at a time when HMG was flush with cash then maybe history could have been diverted, but its come out when Our Leader is staring into the face of a Great Recession with all the money gone.
How to ameliorate - the original rollouts of previous networks had public access points - taps on street corners, lanes to the roads, telephone boxes etc. This will have to be the first approach - how about using libraries and not shutting all those rural post offices so there can be high speed access. The other thing is to roll out local wireless broadband - imagine if every village church in the land was a wireless broadband tranceiver... the
ley-line fans may still be proved to be on the right (straight) track.
